At UCR, we value taking the financial burden off of writers so that they can study and write without, we hope, going into debt. We do not admit more students than we can fund in substantial ways via fellowships and stipends.

Our MFA Program is also distinct in its opportunities for cross-genre study in both seminars and workshops. There are hundreds of manifestations of how and why writers might want to study another genre, and we respect and support that. We recognize literary luminaries who have done the same and do not want to limit our students to the craft of one genre.

Come write in Riverside, where you will be supported artistically, financially, and communally. UCR, truly, is a place where everyone has a place:

•#1 UCR is ranked as the 7th most diverse university in the nation (U.S. News & World Report)

• #2 university in the nation for contributing to the public good (Washington Monthly)

• #3 “best college for Hispanic students” (BestColleges.com)

• #3 university in the nation for community service participation (Washington Monthly)

• We are a “Top 10 Trans-Friendly” university indexed by Campus Pride

We are unabashedly proud of these rankings, and we want writers of talent and vision to join our diverse artistic community.

Come join us at UCR. You’ll find us nestled by the Box Springs Mountains in orange grove country, where our writers are teeming with ideas, scenes, stanzas, plots, stage directions, and stories about their lives.

I dedicate my no-trump vote to the brilliantly minded, loving, kind, and generous living creatures in the world, humans included. To all the morning sunrises and evening moon appearances. To all the forests delivering rain and breath for the moving world inhabitants. To each and every person who has been traumatized, bullied, wounded, raped, murdered, tortured, survivors and not. To those who no matter how difficult their life’s transpirings they continued to hold hope and to those who lost hope or never knew it to begin with due to the circumstances to which they were born into. I dedicate my no-trump vote to love and learning, to living and to reaching whatever it is the mind’s eye calls us to. I dedicate my no-trump vote to the future, to the generations coming, and to those we have lost and mourn with their many many wishes flooding through us and all those who follow, for us to dream and live, in their memory and for their dignity. To those who hold dignity dear and to those who have yet to understand the privilege of dignity. To those who have never had an iota of privilege and who barely take in breath without repercussion. To those who will grow dreams for all of us in the verdant gardens of their developing minds. To those who will fill us with the beautiful abundance of life and will protect our air, our land, our rivers, streams, creeks, aquifers, oceans, watershed, to those water protectors at Standing Rock, those Oceti Sakowin, Sacred Stone, Red Warrior camps, and to all of their brave supporters, to each and every person brutalized for defending safe earth and air and clean water in Indigenous communities globally and throughout the Americas, from ice cap to ice cap. For those communities losing their ice caps due to the burning of fossil fuels. For the communities, animal life, plant life, fish, and flying who are losing their homes and their lives due to the blundering monstrosities money has fixated and fashioned into the beasts of empire crushing the soul of the planet. I dedicate my no-trump vote to my family with many abilities and races and rates of survival, or not. To my children and grandchildren and friends and relatives. I dedicate my no-trump vote to every border-crosser that had borders cross them and still kept standing. To all of those #noDAPL Water Protectors standing now, taking mercenary artillery hits (rubber bullets, bean bag shots, mace, pepper spray, baton hit), who have been under siege in North Dakota on the Cannonball, marked and caged, and to those who protect the graves of their ancestors wherever they may be. To those who open the erased histories to cleanse the world and let her breathe again. May she breathe again, may she breathe.

The Natural History Museum initiated this sign-on letter concerning the destruction of Native American burial grounds and sacred sites by the Dakota Access Pipeline company. If you are an archaeologists, anthropologist, historian or museum worker you are invited to add your name by emailing info@thenaturalhistorymuseum.org.

To President Obama, the United States Department of Justice, Department of the Interior, and the Army Corps of Engineers:

As archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and museum workers committed to responsible stewardship, we are invested in the preservation and interpretation of archaeological and cultural heritage for the common good. We join the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in denouncing the recent destruction of ancient burial sites, places of prayer and other significant cultural artifacts sacred to the Lakota and Dakota people.

On Saturday, September 3, 2016, the company behind the contentious Dakota Access Pipeline project bulldozed land containing Native American burial grounds, grave markers, and artifacts–including ancient cairns and stone prayer rings. The construction crews, flanked by private security and canine squads, arrived just hours after the Standing Rock Sioux tribal lawyers disclosed the location of the recently discovered site in federal court filings.

Former tribal historic preservation officer Tim Mentz called the discovery of the site “one of the most significant archeological finds in North Dakota in many years.” “This demolition is devastating,” Tribal Chairman David Archambault II said. “These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced. In one day, our sacred land has been turned into hollow ground.”

We are familiar with the long history of desecration of Indigenous People’s artifacts and remains worldwide. Many of us put countless hours into developing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to prevent burial desecration of this type, yet the pipeline was approved without a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and the cultural resources survey did not involve proper consultation with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other tribes in the region.

The destruction of these sacred sites adds yet another injury to the Lakota, Dakota, and other Indigenous Peoples who bear the impacts of fossil fuel extraction and transportation. If constructed, this pipeline will continue to encourage oil consumption that causes climate change, all the while harming those populations who contributed little to this crisis.

We call on the federal government to abide by its laws and to conduct a thorough environmental impact statement and cultural resources survey on the pipeline’s route, with proper consultation with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. We stand with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and affirm their treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, and the protection of their lands, waters, cultural and sacred sites, and we stand with all those attempting to prevent further irreparable losses.

With concern,

Brenda Toineeta Pipestem, Chair, Board of Trustees, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

Richard Lariviere, PhD, President and CEO, The Field Museum, Chicago, IL

Luke Swetland, President and CEO, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

Bryanna Durkee, Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, emphasis in Archaeology, Cultural Resource Management certificate. Fort Lewis College. Member of the Cherokee Nation. Community Member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Carol Silverman, Professor, Department of Anthropology and Folklore Program, University of Oregon

Patty Kelly PhD, Anthropologist, Haverford College

Lesley Harrington, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta

E. N. Anderson, Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

Donna L. Moody, Abenaki, PhD, Cultural Anthropology

Gerardo Renique, Assistant Professor, Department of History, City University of New York

Paul M Liffman, Research Professor and Chair, Centro de Estudios Antropológicos, El Colegio de Michoacán; Research Fellow, Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS), Rice University.

James N Houser, MS, Forest Health Coordinator and Cultural Resources Trainer, Central, West and North Texas, Texas A&M Forest Service

Stevan Harrell, Professor of Anthropology and of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle

Erin Joyce, Independent Curator of Contemporary Indigenous North American Art, Art Critic for Hyperallergic, and Vice Chair for the Beautification and Public Arts Commission for the City of Flagstaff, AZ

D.S. Red Haircrow, M.A. Student of Native American Studies, Montana State University Bozeman, Member of Native American Journalist Association (NAJA), Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), American Psychology Association (APA)

Christa D. Cesario, Ph.D., Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Elizabeth Ellis, PhD, Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at University of Pennsylvania, Assistant Professor of History New York University

Ibra Sene, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of History/Global and International Studies Program, The College of Wooster, Ohio

La‘akea K. Yoshida, M.St (Oxon): Ph.D. Student and Teaching & Research Assistant, Social and Cultural Foundations of Education (History of Indigenous Education in the U.S.), University of Washington, Seattle

Jennifer Crowley, Lecturer and PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University at Albany, SUNY

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Ph.D., Professor of American Studies and Anthropology , Chair of American Studies, Wesleyan University

Adrienne Strong, Ph.D. Candidate, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Anthropology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and Universiteit van Amsterdam

Shannon M. Vance, MA, PhD student, Department of Anthropology and Research Laboratories of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Sarah A. Grady, B.S. Anthropology-University of Maryland, College Park, Master’s student in Applied Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park

Elizabeth Pestana, B.A., Scientific Consultant Services, Inc., Archaeologist; current student at University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, Department of American Studies, Historic Preservation graduate certificate program

Sila Yiqi Huang, Undergraduate Student, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, Department in Classic and Religious Studies, with Minor in Museum and Heritage Study, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

Anthony Hawboldt, B.A, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

Martha S. Brown, B.A. Anthropology, Western Kentucky University

Julia Weiss, Recent Graduate, Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, University of South Florida Department of Anthropology, Tampa, FL

Maura Griffith, BA, Departments of Biology and Classics, Trinity College

Dario Novellino, PhD., Research Fellow, Centre for Biocultural Diversity, School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent at Canterbury, United Kingdom

Jessica Dolan, PhD, Anthropologist and Ethnobotanist, McGill University (American citizen), formerly employed by the Harvard Museum of Natural History/ Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University

The Natural History Museum is a mobile and pop-up museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. It is an independent museum that does not take money from corporations or the government. We rely on individual donations from people just like you. Please consider making a contribution to support our work: http://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/donate.

My Creating Poetry class continues to stun me, or I should say the effects some teacher from their long-ago pasts does. See, these are my upper-level, undergrad students who have elected to try their hand at writing poems or to further develop some poetic series they have been writing toward. Inevitably, at least once a semester (if not more), some serious soul or another recounts the experience of having been instructed to seek the right answer when ferreting out motifs and theme, or the meaning as they engage in a close reading of the text, of having been told to first research what other critics have said about a work—or, even more interestingly, what their teacher says is the right answer. Here, I keep my tongue and old American Bandstand allusions in check: “I’ll give it 78, Dick. It’s got a groovy beat and you can move to it.” Via…

(LEA LA VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL ABAJO)

Today, we have borrowed the title of our post from Eriberto Gualinga’s reflection in the closing of his documentary Children of the Jaguar—a brave testimony of resistance by the Sarayaku nation (2002-2012) against the Ecuadorian State’s project of oil extraction in the Amazon. In the presence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica, Jose Gualinga, Eriberto’s brother and Sarayaku President, explains the connection between his community and the forest:

We’ve come from our distant lands in Sarayaku, from the River of Maize. We’re descended from the Jaguar, children of Amazanga Runa, sons and daughters of the People of the Midday.

Children of the Jaguar shows the courage of indigenous filmmakers as they use video and creativity as a weapon to protect their territories. In 2002, the Ecuadorian government violated the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention…

Streaming, by Allison Adelle Hegde Coke,is concerned with the interconnectedness of historical moments that are enmeshed with the personal and global spiritual consciousness of the present world. The speaker says in the title poem, “Impressions strummed today / incite future impulsion, / create past prophecy” (6). Global warming, the changing climate, September 11, street children in Medellin, Colombia, the rights of indigenous, the Dust Bowl are all issues in the forum of the text. Historical or current manmade problems are evoked: “Along an echo-wrinkle in existence / your presence permeates swaying” (6). That is, the many folds or moments of experience echo in the spirit, or emotions of others, and permeate the many swaying moods of society, culture, and politics.

The collection is tightly structured, starting with an elegy to her mother, and having each successive section dedicated to family –…